By PETER PÁL PELBART*
Something very exceptional must have happened for Israel's denial of the Palestinian issue to give rise to a jingoistic version
More than twenty years ago, Israeli writer Amós Oz spoke to a German newspaper about the situation in Gaza. Instead of waiting for the interviewer to ask, he began by asking readers: “Question number one: what would you do if your neighbor across the street sat on the balcony, took his son in his arms and started shooting in the direction of your son's room? Question number two: What would you do if the neighbor across the street dug a tunnel from his son's room to blow up your house or kidnap your family?”
It is surprising that an author of his caliber compared the population of Gaza to ordinary neighbors who, suddenly, inexplicably, went crazy. Neighbors? You can control the electricity, water, telephone, internet of the residents in front, decide what is the maximum number of calories they should consume, what medicines they can have access to, who enters and leaves the house, from time to time do it there some incursion, and continue considering neighbors that you watch over and dominate?
The same Amos Oz said a long time ago that it was time for Israelis and Palestinians to divorce. In the book The last war?, Elias Sanbar, born in Haifa and based in Paris, close to Yasser Arafat and former Palestinian ambassador to UNESCO, personal friend of Gilles Deleuze, translator of Darwish and founder of the magazine Les études palestiniennes, simply responds as follows: “to get a divorce you must have been married first. Well, that never happened. From the beginning, neither side wanted it.” Sanbar says clearly: “this conflict was born from the very impossibility of a union”.¹
But we are not going to go back to the beginnings of this tragedy. Let us suffice to remember the fact, certainly explosive, that Gaza has long been an immense open-air prison. And what is the jailer's dream? When presenting his vision of the future for the Middle East, in 2023, before the UN General Assembly, before October 7, the Israeli Prime Minister praised the strategic, military and commercial alliance to be signed between Israel, Saudi Arabia and United States – the Abraham Accords.
Only then would peace, security and prosperity be guaranteed. On the map of the region, displayed at that time, neither Gaza nor the West Bank appeared. They evaporated! In their place, a Greater Israel. What would be the fate of the five and a half million Palestinians living there? Israeli citizenship? O apartheid? A bantustan? The expulsion? The genocide?
In his new book titled Towards a global civil war?, in the chapter dedicated to Gaza, Maurizio Lazzarato writes: “Palestinian resistance forces, such as Hamas, aim to destroy the State of Israel and wish to throw Israeli Jews into the sea. However, they do not have the necessary means or alliances to do so. What constitutes an illusory aspiration for the Palestinians is, on the contrary, a reality implemented day after day, year after year by Israel. He can expel the Palestinians from Palestine thanks to his army, the most powerful in the region, and thanks to his military and political alliances with the United States. In practice, it is the Israelis who, on a daily basis, with their armed settlers, implement the slogan “from the river to the sea” – an accusation attributed by Westerners to the Palestinians. (…) For decades, and not just since the Netanyahu government, the occupation of land by settlers has continued inexorably, constituting a process of ethnic cleansing under the eyes of all democracies zealous for human rights. The last act of this process consists of the expulsion of the population from Gaza, after its destruction.”
Today it is necessary to recognize: that graphic erasure brandished before the world prefigured, without being able to predict under what circumstances, what would actually happen after October 7th. The ongoing war is not against Hamas, but against the Palestinian population of Gaza – not to say against the Palestinian people and their political horizon. Interestingly, Israel supported Hamas for decades precisely because of its fundamentalist intransigence, as it saw it as the ideal counterpoint to the negotiating attitude of the Palestinian Authority. With Hamas it was certain that there would never be a peace agreement that would imply the return of territories and the acceptance of a Palestinian State. Infinite war and endless occupation were guaranteed.
In official Zionist historiography, what the Palestinians call the Catastrophe (Nakba) was nothing more than a historical accident, a by-product of the war: the supposedly voluntary exodus of seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians, radiophonically incited by Arab leaders to abandon their homes with the promise of returning soon after victory. This version is the denial of the Palestinian Catastrophe, as if this repressed person would not return in some way, or as if this foreclosed person would not return in the form of a haunting.
Displaced for decades by Palestinian and Israeli historiography, from Rashid Khalidi to Benny Morris and Ilan Pappé, this narrative is giving way to another, taken up by increasingly wider circles of the Israeli political elite and vectored by orthodox and fundamentalists. As Jonathan Adler, the new editor of website +972: “after denying the events of 1948 for decades, and even punishing the public commemoration of the dispossession of Palestine, members of the Israeli government coalition transformed the Nakba into an “action plan”, something to “be proud of””.
From denial to pride
Something very exceptional must have happened for Israel's denial of the Palestinian issue to give rise to a jingoistic version; From absolute denialism we moved on to a kind of open triumphalism. The shame turned into pride and arrogance, with the predominance of the voice of the extreme right, as if saying: “Yes, the Nakba happened, and we not only recognize it, we boast about it. After all, as October 7, 2023 demonstrates, we have always been dealing with animals.”
An even more disturbing addition is now added: it is time to “complete the job”, initiated in a veiled manner by the historic labor leader David Ben-Gurion. It is not currently a question of taking advantage of any opportunity to expel more Palestinians with a view to consolidating a Jewish majority in Israeli territory, but of destroying all the conditions of existence of the population confined in Gaza – read everything that can guarantee electricity, water, basic sanitation, housing, health, education, food, agricultural cultivation, research and communication.
It is as if, finally, in an angry outburst, the previously unspeakable statement resounded from the four winds, as pronounced by a religious political leader: “The time has come for a Second Nakba".
For decades, Israel governed daily life in the West Bank through administrative procedures, expropriations covered by military decrees, “preventive” detentions, incessant intimidation through night searches, denunciations, etc. A powerful portrait of this daily life is in the beautiful film by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi entitled Five broken cameras.² To avoid a new Nakba, unlike in 1948, Palestinians in the West Bank now cling to the land, in what they call sumud.
However, as Israel multiplies the number of settlers every day, with them having the status of Israeli citizens with full rights, a clear apartheid regime was established: on the one hand the occupiers, on the other the Palestinian population subjected to military administration and deprived of basic rights.
With the extreme right occupying the Ministry of National Security and part of the Ministry of Defense, criminal actions against Palestinian residents of the West Bank, promoted by settlers and militiamen, occur under the complacent eyes of soldiers and with the tacit incitement of politicians, both from the extreme right as well as a more traditional right.
As Palestinian psychoanalyst Samah Jabr says in Sumud in times of genocide,³ “a Nakba it is an ongoing injury that has never been healed, it is a renewed contemporary insult directed at every Palestinian humiliated, imprisoned or killed, it is salt added to the wound.” He further says: “a collective trauma requires collective healing”. But how can we imagine a collective healing when the very notion of collective is constantly aborted by the other side, which no longer needs to hide what it does, as if the time had come to come out of the closet, do everything in the open, assume what has already been done and what to be done in the form of a renewed and promising national project?
It is still not clear whether the internal collapse of Israeli society, as read in Bentzi Laor's article, opened space for the messianic tsunami, at once destructive and salvationist, not to say suicidal, or whether this tsunami is exactly one of the causes of the fragmentation of the country.
Israel's ethical ruin
It is painful to see the extent to which the decades of occupation have disfigured Israeli society. They showed, retroactively, the radical rupture that the founding of the State of Israel made in relation to the variegated two-millennial history of the Jewish diasporas, in two opposing directions. It is clear that Zionism aimed for a rupture.
This was, so to speak, the core of his project: never again should the Jew be hunched over, submissive, frightened, having to bargain for his survival with the powerful, beset by misery and humiliation, without land or homeland, without a language of his own. , defenseless, constantly subject to pogroms, murders, expulsions, discriminatory laws, denied access to universities, public offices, military service, restricted to commerce, usury, sacred books and faith, to finally be taken to the chambers by the millions gas and crematorium ovens.
Didn't the Zionist dream imply a complete reversal of mental and social, material and political misery, towards sovereignty and self-determination? A virgin land, a new language, a new man, farmer and soldier at the same time, intrepid and proud, tough on the outside and tender on the inside like the cactus in the biblical landscape (sabra), owner of his nose, his country, his its destiny, creator of a more egalitarian and generous, plural and democratic, open and inclusive society. The national dream and political utopia joined hands.
It was in the midst of this dreamlike mist that the serpent's egg grew. The real historical circumstances that this mythology concealed have been treated in abundance by historians, revealing to what extent, and this since the beginning of the Jewish colonization of Palestine, the native local population was ignored and underestimated by some segments of immigrants - in contrast to currents alternatives. The new Jew, who reinvented himself in what he considered “his” National Home (previously inhabited by another community), found himself drawn into a spiral of violence as a result of the inevitable Palestinian resistance, which had no reason to accept the arrival of the Jews.
As the Holocaust only accentuated the feeling of irreparable injustice, the new State ended up capitalizing on the trauma. Its military and technological superiority was combined with the conviction of religious and ethnic supremacy. The expansionist and colonialist character of the military occupation since the Six-Day War took on a messianic and fundamentalist color that finally took the heart of the State by storm. As the poet Mahmoud Darwish said, “the great tragedy of the Palestinians is that they are victims of victims.”
How far we are from the rich contribution that exponents of Jewish culture made to the construction of Western modernity. From Spinoza to Marx, from Freud to Hanna Arendt, from Benjamin to Kafka and Rose of Luxemburg, is our political and philosophical horizon even thinkable without such names? Today we are witnessing the sad decline of an entire ethical and revolutionary tradition – what Enzo Traverso called the end of Jewish modernity.
The radical transformation that occurred within Jewishness and some hypotheses regarding the deeper reasons for this ethnocratic turnaround were the subject of a book recently published by Bentzi Laor and the author of these lines: The post-Jewish Jew: Jewishness and ethnocracy. It is not appropriate here to explain the hypotheses developed in this study, in which we seek to determine the factors that cage Jewish subjectivity in self-victimization and Judeocentrism, and their implications for the destiny of Jews in Israel and the world. It is enough for us to recall one or another line developed there.
The colonial Jew
How can one of the most suffering, persecuted and deterritorialized peoples in history, victim of a colossal genocide, once re-territorialized in Palestine renamed Israel, be responsible for the repeated and incessant exile of thousands of Palestinians? How can this State, proud of its democracy, maintain an occupation for fifty-seven years, multiply settlements on the occupied territory and banish the word “occupation” from the official vocabulary, as if it did not exist?
One of the paradoxes is that the settlement colonialism practiced today by the Hebrew State takes place precisely in a post-colonial era. Is this regressive direction, against the grain of history, not responsible for the indignation caused by the war in Gaza?
Inspired by Fanon, Lazzarato recalls that in colonization the subjectivities of the colonizer and the colonized communicate, they contaminate each other, especially through “absolute” violence. Sartre said about Algeria: “How can we not recognize in the ferocity of these oppressed peasants the ferocity of the colonizers, which they absorb through every pore and which they cannot get rid of?” Fanon, on whom Sartre was inspired, clarified: “Colonialism (…) is violence in the state of nature and can only incline in the face of even greater violence”.
We suppose that history has inflated the image of the Jewish people so much (in the prejudice against them or in the pride they display, in the killing or in the arrogance) that we no longer know what the word “Jew” means today – and what multiplicity it covers or covers. They will say that this is the beauty of these people – “we don’t know what defines them”. Now, how can such multiplicity be a source of pride if every day the political practice with which a large part of Jews identify is funneled towards the predominance of fascism?
The time has come to free the Jewish diaspora from the political-ideological tutelage of the State of Israel. Increasingly, he intends to speak on behalf of Jews around the world, represent their interests, and become the exclusive heir to the memory and cultural legacy of Judaism. The most recent example of this was the mise-en-scène of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in front of the two houses of the American Congress, whose media coverage had as a backdrop the gigantic tables of law.
This is what can be called the political hijacking of a story. Moses, him? Defender of Ten commandments, the person accused of genocide by the International Criminal Court in The Hague, based on the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide? And what is the prime minister's response to the decision of the UN's International Court of Justice in The Hague – that the occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal, as well as their settlement by Israeli settlers? That the occupied territories “are part of the historic homeland of the Jewish people”.
A theological and teleological vision insists on seeing Israel as the necessary outcome of a myriad of trajectories that make up what is called Jewish history, but seeing the State as the consummate form of Jewish identity is a paradox. It is time to embrace the diasporic dimension not only as an inseparable component of the Jewish condition, but perhaps as its most distinctive element – proper here means, paradoxically, foreign.
Diaspora, by definition, means dispersion, and, therefore, mixing with the outside, openness to foreignness. It was this plasticity that allowed the most fruitful and inventive miscegenations, the philosophical and spiritual adventures, the most revolutionary. Inhabiting the earth as a foreigner: this is what some philosophers learned from a heretical messianic tradition – this is a thought that should serve us today. We are transitory, ephemeral beings, and every political deposit in immortality leads to a politics of death, as José Gil clearly saw, in his beautiful recent study Death and democracy.
It is necessary to say two words about the Israeli population. Beyond the decisions of politicians, generals, religious leaders and the sensationalist media, there are the small people, those who experience daily attacks and earthquakes with anguish, fear, affliction, mourning their dead, having to abandon their homes to escape the rockets from Hezbollah, deprived of the care and support of a government concerned only with its own political survival.
They are black Jews from Ethiopia and residents of the outskirts, they are the few survivors of the Holocaust, but their many descendants, they are the residents of kibbutz who invented a rare type of communism, unfortunately now in extinction, are the hundreds of activists involved in offering Palestinians legal protection against expropriation or violence, they are the remnants of a left in decline.
Progressive Jews in Israel realize that their fate is not so different from that of Hannah Arendt and Stefan Zweig in the 1930s, gradually marginalized and, so to speak, “vomited” out of their habitat of origin – in their case, German. Progressive Israelis who long for sustainable peace have become outsiders in the midst of the new Judeo-fascist culture. This was the case of Yeshayahu Leibowitz, an internationally renowned scientist, extremely religious, and one of the most powerful voices the country has ever heard.
Shortly after the Six-Day War, he prophesied the ruin of Israeli society if the country maintained its occupation of the newly conquered territories – and dared to speak of Judeo-Nazism. A candidate for the prestigious Israel Prize, he withdrew when it became clear that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin would refuse to award it. Thus, there is a return to the tragic past, but this time carried out by the Jews themselves against their unsubmissive exponents.
Mention should also be made of all ordinary citizens in Israel, who, intoxicated by a warlike atmosphere from birth, are hardly in a position to understand how they are drawn into even greater catastrophes than those they think they are defending themselves against. It is the drama of a people haunted by centuries of persecution when they discover that they continue to live a ghetto life – now on a larger, national scale. They believe they are surrounded by Nazis, and that any critic of Israel is an anti-Semite.
Apparently the world remains “against us” – anti-Semitism is reborn everywhere and justifies defensive entrenchment and political isolation. That the Israeli government's vengeful and genocidal attitude against the Palestinian population is responsible for a large part of the protests around the world – and that this does not necessarily equate to anti-Semitism – is beyond the prevailing political view in the country.
The fact is that there is an ostensible selectivity in sensitivity to the suffering of others on the part of a portion of the Israeli population that is more porous to far-right ideology. Put simply: the murder of a single Israeli child by Hamas is abhorrent (and who could disagree with that?); but the murder of fifteen thousand Palestinian children is considered by the Israeli population to be the price paid by the Palestinians for their hatred, or for their supposed complicity in allowing Hamas terrorists to infiltrate among them and use them as human shields, or simply because they are Palestinians.
Some Israeli television channels spend hours interviewing all the relatives of each of the Israeli hostages already released, or the relatives of the hostages still in captivity, or the victims of the October 7 massacre by Hamas. What's more understandable than that? However, the silence that covers the death of the forty thousand Palestinian victims on the part of some press organizations, in a kind of self-censorship, only makes critical and dissenting voices more important, such as that of Guideon Levy, whose video interview available in this dossier is exemplary. Not to mention the various protests coming from activists, NGOs, various movements that make up the rich Israeli political mosaic.
Although the Iranian threat is by far the most dangerous (because it never hid the project of destroying the Jewish State), without any connection with the Palestinian problem, it continues to be treated by Israeli politicians as a piece on the electoral chessboard. The only solution envisioned and advocated then seems to be total war. Total war or total victory: we know where this disjunction ends – in total defeat. There, killing and suicide coincide. All in the name of peace.
What peace?
Susan Sontag was the one who best referred to the dangers of a fake peace. “What do you mean by the word peace? Do we mean absence of conflict? Do we mean oblivion? Do we mean forgiveness? Or do we mean enormous tiredness, exhaustion, an emptying of resentment?” (…) It seems to me that what most people mean when they say peace is victory. Victory on your side. That's what it means to some, while to others peace means defeat. If the idea prevails that peace, although desirable, implies an unacceptable renunciation of legitimate demands, then the most plausible thing is that the war will continue forever. Isn't that exactly what we see today?
What can we demand today? An immediate ceasefire? The release of the hostages by Hamas? The reconstruction of Gaza? A Palestinian State? Is a Palestinian state still viable in the remaining territory in the West Bank, given the five hundred thousand Jewish settlers, not counting the two hundred thousand in Jerusalem? Is the utopia of a binational or plurinational State still valid? Or the even more radical utopia: that of a non-state, non-statist, post-national federation? Do we still have time, breath, and political imagination to go beyond or below the idea of the State, of national identity, of the myths of ancestry that preside over the present?
Elias Sanbar is categorical: “A solution exists. And, unless one wants to permanently repeat the same sterile litany, it requires freeing oneself from the “normal” order of sequence and daring to “put the cart before the horse”, that is, to begin the path towards peace for what should be its logical end. Negotiations would thus begin with full and early recognition of Palestine.”
But, to achieve this, alongside political decolonization, wouldn't it be necessary to have a kind of subjective decolonization, as Frantz Fanon would say – the most important of which, without a doubt, consists of freeing oneself from the violence of the colonizer? The colonial relationship is, by definition, one of absolute violence. When settlements in occupied territories are made in the name of vital space, strategic depth, or for historical-religious reasons, it is necessary to ask whether this comes solely from fear. Palestinian psychoanalyst Jabr is categorical: it's not fear, it's hate. It would be necessary to help Israel to admit its hatred.
Fidelity
Perhaps this task falls to Jewish communities around the world. Instead of automatically aligning with the policies of a far-right Israeli government (and sometimes local, as happened in Brazil), it would not be healthy for them to set aside their blind, illusory apolitical loyalty, based on religious, identity and tribal identification. , not to say sanguine? Unfortunately, they have long allowed themselves to be protected and represented by Israel, offering themselves as a source of financial and political support, or as an immigration reserve. Thus, they only reinforce a supposed worldwide Jewish unanimity that crushes the diversity of these diasporas.
The Jewish tradition, so plural, and at the same time so rich in the philosophical and ethical elaboration of otherness, such as that expressed by Benjamin when referring to the defeated in History, or by Levinas when evoking the face of the other, who says: “No thou shalt kill”, seems to have been left aside here. Wouldn't the Jewish diaspora be much more faithful to the historical sensitivity of its ancestors if, instead of allowing itself to be guided by fear or hatred, “sad passions”, it combatted the predominant reactivity within its own midst? And wouldn’t it be so much more dignified if it were done from an ethical rather than an ethnic point of view?
It is not about adopting a façade, politically correct stance, just to alleviate conscience or guilt or shame. I am not unaware of how many mixed emotions disturb the Jewish soul in these days, and the difficulty of giving them a coherent formulation. But, in parallel to this subjective elaboration, there is something whose urgency is impossible to ignore: the risk of the war's indefinite prolongation, which only international pressure is capable of stopping. If Israel has dedicated so much effort over decades to co-opting Jewish communities around the world, it is, among other things, because it recognized their strategic relevance.
The influence of Jewish communities in the countries where they live, and in multiple spheres – financial, political, academic, media – has ensured support and profitable alliances for Israel. The flip side of this is equally valid: in the face of an insane war, dissent from the diaspora could increase internal and external pressure on the Israeli government. Of course there are Jewish voices speaking out around the world, whether in Berlin, Paris or Washington. Even in Brazil there are them – although rare, lukewarm, ambiguous. Mostly, it is silence that predominates, and it is strident. There is no need to remember the extent to which such omission can mean complicity.
In March this year I made a short visit to Budapest, where I was born. My partner and I stayed near the large central synagogue, today an important tourist focus. As it was Saturday, they did not allow tourists to enter – except for Jews who were going to religious services. It was by declaring myself as such that we were able to enter. Surprised to see the synagogue reasonably full, delighted to hear people speaking in Hungarian and praying in typical Eastern European Hebrew, for a moment I felt like revisiting the atmosphere in which my grandfather lived and prayed, a hundred years ago.
It was a moment of rapture and bliss. But it was just a moment. It didn't take long for a magazine to begin circulating among the faithful – it was the official organ of the community. What was my surprise when I saw, from the first page to the last, photos of Israeli soldiers armed to the teeth, sometimes in front of the Western Wall, sometimes in combat, sometimes proudly brandishing the Israeli flag on some armored vehicle, amidst the ruins in Gaza . Israeli fascism today projects itself onto what remains of yesterday's Hungarian Jewry, and overcodes it.
Everything here is paradoxical: the Nazi extermination machine was rushing to complete the “final solution” before the world war ended. The only thing missing was the Hungarian Jews!! It was necessary to dedicate the last war effort to taking five hundred and fifty thousand Jews from that country to the gas chambers, with the complicity and support of local fascists. The political heirs of those fascists are today led by Viktor Orbán, an exponent of the global far right and a great ally of Israel. The cards shuffle dangerously, revealing unsuspected affinities.
otherness
A fifteen-year-old girl, in the novel by Octavia Butler (The parable of the sower), has a rare symptom: she cannot help but feel the suffering of any being she comes across – friend or foe, human or animal. She bleeds when she sees someone bleeding, she cries when she sees someone crying. This happens even when, out of her helplessness, in self-defense, she has been led to kill whoever was attacking her, be it a dog or a thief. Isn't something like that missing today? An affectivity, that is, the ability to be affected by the pain of others, even if it is an opponent?
To return to the geopolitical scale, we must remember that the dream of an absolutely protected life can only lead to the nightmare of a total war. The first thing to do, in the middle of a nightmare, may simply be this: wake up.
But is this so simple? A Palestinian girl from Gaza, with her entire body singed, lying in a hospital bed, tearfully asked her mother: was what she was about to experience a nightmare or reality? Unfortunately, he couldn't wake up.
But what about us? And them? And now? Would we only be left with despair? In his novel titled Ghetto children, Elias Khoury writes: “I live in post-despair.” Is this an appropriate way to designate this time? Not post-modernity, not post-colonialism, not post-capitalism, not post-anthropocentrism… But post-despair… Can such an expression gain any meaning today? Neither pessimism nor optimism, but courage to stop the nightmare that divides the world between those who deserve to live and the others – who don't even deserve to survive.
*Peter Pál Pelbart He is a professor of philosophy at PUC-SP. Author, among other books, of The reverse of nihilism: cartographies of exhaustion (N-1 Editions). [https://amzn.to/406v2tU]
Originally published on the website of n-1editions [https://n-1edicoes.org/e-isto-um-pesadelo/].
Notes
¹ For a more in-depth assessment of the subject, see the interview in French. Available in: https://youtu.be/PzjO8KfK9m8?si=8PBV84MSvMM9f6Q4
² Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qefhNRjjmw.
³ Samah Jabr, Sumud in times of genocide. Rio de Janeiro: Tabla, 2024.
4 See the beautiful article by Laymert Garcia dos Santos, “Mahmud Darwich, Palestinian and red skin”, available at https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/mahamoud-darwich-palestino-e-pele-vermelha/
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